Dicebreaker Recommends is a series of monthly board game, RPG and other tabletop recommendations from our friends at our sibling site, Dicebreaker.
A criticism sometimes levelled at board games in comparison to video games and their tabletop cousin, the pen-and-paper RPG, is that they lack variety. It's only natural - with the people around the table handling the rules and pieces in place of code or the limitless human imagination, keeping the possibilities short enough to fit on a player reference card is necessary to avoid turning game night into six hours of administrative work.
This means many board games specialise in doing one or two things, and how well you perform them round after round becomes the grading factor for your final score. Pandemic? Move and remove cubes. Catan? Trade and build. Literally any dungeon-crawler? Move X squares, roll Y dice. There are some exceptions, but these tend to edge back into that foreboding territory of "two hours to learn, 12 hours to play" - your Twilight Imperiums, Campaign for North Africas, Game of Thrones: The Board Gameses. Few board games find the sweet spot between breadth and depth.